2012年12月16日星期日

Classic clouds roll into contemporary sky at YCBA

Mark Leonard's head may have been in the clouds for two years while he brought his artistic process to an installation of contemporary paintings created in response to John Constable's cloud studies.

But the methodic execution of this project also displays the artist's prowess as one of the most respected painting restorers working today. Chief conservator at the Dallas Museum of Art, Leonard has studied and restored thousands of paintings, including works by Constable, as well as Reynolds,Posts with indoor tracking system on TRX Systems develops systems that locate and track personnel indoors. Renoir, Rembrandt and Velazquez.

The results of the project, "Reflections on Constables Cloud Studies: Paintings by Mark Leonard," is an installation of 11 works by Leonard, displayed side-by-side with Constable's paintings of sky and landscape in the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) permanent collections gallery.

Created in the 1820s in oil paint on paper, a number of Constable's cloud studies were framed after his death in 1837 and began to be viewed as dynamic independent works of art that represent the force and variability of nature. YCBA is home to seven of the studies.

In a recent talk at YCBA, Leonard described his deconstruction of Constable's cloud studies and reinvention in his own uniquely evocative, tightly composed response to the classic works.

The painter spent a week at YCBA intently studying Constable's paintings and drawings.

"I meditated upon the cloud studies and thought, 'What would I do now?' I had no idea.

"When Constable was painting clouds, they were constantly changing and he had to fuse them into a whole, a format that felt naturally right and beautiful," Leonard explained. "I had to (determine) what I wanted to interject, what interested me."

After seeing a show at the National Gallery in London of contemporary works by Bridget Riley, paired with works of Old Masters,Whether you are installing a floor tiles or a shower wall, Leonard says, "Riley's gridwork resonated beautifully" with the older works and it was a confidence booster that he, too, would find a contemporary connection to Constable's cloud studies.

"As a painting restorer, I have to be able to match color," Leonard noted, so he broke down five of the studies into their respective palettes, creating a color-matching panel in which he blended modern pigments to replicate Constable's colors.

Next, he came up with a visual motif. He searched for underlying geometries-or the "natural framework"-in Constable's seemingly free brushwork.

"Constable talks about clouds as forming lanes-horizontal movement," Leonard said. "I liked that sense of tumbling movement, locomotion."

He depicts this with a rope as a single lane of clouds. The orb became a secondary motif, which he noted appeared in early 19th-century German landscape paintings-a mystical, spiritual, otherworldly element that he interspersed with the ropes and clouds. Leonard also conveys Constable's masterful ability to create contrasting areas of light and dark in these paintings.

When asked if he found this project to be constricting or liberating, Leonard responded, "It's really different working on someone else's paintings when my job is to disappear-and as an artist, to be sure your own soul is there. This project gave me a chance to do both."

Amy Meyers, YCBA director, commented that in this exhibition Leonard has successfully married his professional and artistic skills "to create a new creative vision and a new depth of understanding of (John Constable's) work."

She also noted that YCBA "hasn't had a tradition of inviting modern living artists into the permanent exhibition space" and hopes it will become a new tradition at the museum.

Shot from above, over the Indian city of Haridwar, the scene is a rammed-together jumble of low-rise houses in which the great river is nowhere to be seen. It looks as if the buildings themselves have swamped the Ganges. Yet, perhaps more poignantly, lacking in human warmth, there's something inanimate to this urban swell - as if the concrete has outgrown its inhabitants, too.

Broota is one of India's most prominent artists and is best known for his satirical paintings from the 1970s. Through a cast of sneering gorillas, and with his defining technique of creating his images by nicking away at thick paint on the canvas using a blade, Broota's works took aim at the disparity of greed and emaciated suffering that he perceived around him at that time.High quality stone mosaic tiles.

The photographs that make up Traces of Man have developed from Broota's experiments with the form in the late 1990s. Akin to the nick-blade process of scratching away at his paintings, the artist taught himself Photoshop and uses it to etch away and splice together imagery that he has photographed over the past few years.

Many are intentionally disorienting.The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. In Reaching Out, we see a huge red crane and a cascade of water collapsing onto its chassis from the lip of a rock cliff above. Others are a little more abstract and an untitled diptych of photographs draws some indistinct connection between the chaotic order of a flock of birds and the swirl of hair on the crown of a man's head.

Traces of Man is a collection that shows a privately pursued offshoot of interest in a very established artist's work. Each image plays with the self-reflection that humans seek in nature, often through their own heavy-handed intervention into a landscape. We're always left grasping at the purpose of the man-made formations that carve their way through a natural space.

Accompanying these photographs is a 1999 painting by Broota, Traces of Man - Unknown Soldier, in which we see a man's form fading away into a speckled wash of leopard-like spots. It's an image of disappearance, in which the ghostly traces of an individual fade behind in negative relief - perpetually beyond our reach.

For this year's holiday season,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. the gallery had planned to mount a juried show of artist-made ornaments called "Holiday Hang-Ups." Gallery co-owner Jennifer Perlow, however, said only four entries were submitted, and the art ornament show was canceled.

Now hanging in the "Hallery" are the richly pigmented plein-air paintings of Eureka artist Billyo O'Donnell. The artist focuses on Missouri landscapes, towns and waterways in his work. A few years ago, O'Donnell completed a project and book, printed by the University of Missouri Press — along with journalist Karen Glines — titled "Painting Missouri: The Counties en Plein Air." For this endeavor, the artist visited and painted a scene from every county in the state. Glines wrote an essay about the history of each county to accompany the paintings.

The works currently available at PS:Gallery are not from the "Counties" project. These paintings depict some of Missouri's waterways and small towns — in all seasons. The fact that the artist paints not in a comfortable studio but on site, often in snow or other inclement weather, generates a sense of awe and respect.

It takes only a moment or two of gazing at one of his blue-lit, snow-dusted landscapes to realize that O'Donnell's toes must have been freezing while he stood still to look and paint. That he uses slow-drying oils, often thickly applied with a palette knife or heavily defined brush strokes, adds to the sense that O'Donnell has some sort of plein-air special gift: How does he transport his paintings without smears and damage when he's finished?

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